By R.W. JOHNSON
The dispute over clauses four and five of the BELA (Basic Education Law Amendment) bill has now reached the crunch point, and there is talk on all sides of the Government of National Unity (GNU) falling apart. Clauses four and five take away the power over admissions to schools and over the school’s language policy from the parental and school governing body organisations, and give it instead to the provincial ministers of education.
In effect a great deal of the push behind this bill comes from Gauteng. On the one hand, the province has a large Afrikaans-speaking population and, accordingly, a number of Afrikaans-medium schools, which are heavily oversubscribed as Afrikaans parents seek to have their children educated in their mother tongue. On the other hand, the Gauteng premier is Panyaza Lesufi who, during his time as provincial minister of education (2019-22), was an outspoken enemy of Afrikaans education.
This partly stems from the revanchist feelings against Afrikaans as “the language of apartheid” which are common among African nationalist populists, of whom Lesufi is a prime example. But it is also the case that the Afrikaans-medium schools get much better results on average than other Gauteng state schools.
This upsets the likes of Lesufi both because it led to unflattering comparisons with the state schools which were more under his wing as minister (i.e. schools effectively controlled by the SA Democratic Teachers Union) and because he tended to equate these superior results with greater social privilege. Naturally, many black parents would like their children to go to schools like these which get the best results – but they want their children taught in English.
The result is the BELA bill. It is fiercely opposed both by the Afrikaans organisations, Afriforum and Solidarity, and by the DA and the FF+. They point out that the number of Afrikaans-medium schools has already shrunk far below what would be justified by the Afrikaans-speaking share of the population, but the key for them all is the constitutional right to mother-tongue education.
Ramaphosa appears to have embarked on the BELA bill – which he has already signed into law – without realising that he was stirring up this hornets’ nest. When the DA made its opposition to the bill clear, he simply delayed the implementation of the offending clauses for three months. He seems to have assumed that in the ensuing negotiation process he could nudge the DA into line – which is rather the attitude the ANC has adopted in general towards its coalition partners. That is, the ANC has acted as if it still has an overall majority and can simply announce new laws like BELA or the NHI bill and that other parties can then be steam-rollered into agreement.
In this case, Ramaphosa’s usual penchant for delay and dither has worked against him, for it has merely given time and space for the SACP, SADTU, the EFF and MKP to all mobilise behind demands for full and immediate implementation of BELA – and for its opponents to mobilise on the opposite side. So Ramaphosa now faces an ugly situation in which most African nationalist factions – and his own deputy president, Paul Mashatile – are demanding full implementation of a law which, after all, Ramaphosa has already signed, while the DA and Solidarity are making it clear that they will, if necessary, go to law to get the offending clauses thrown out. And that if Ramaphosa tries to force the issue, the GNU falls.
Like most African nationalists, Ramaphosa tends to assume that white rule from 1910 to 1994 was simply about oppression and apartheid, whereas anyone who properly studies the history of that period is struck by the tremendous force and durability of the language issue – which, inevitably, always centred on school language policies. No one who understands South African history would have lightly decided to tamper with established language rights.
When Milner tried to force English onto Afrikaans children, the bitter story, re-told a million times by Afrikaner nationalists, was of Afrikaans-speaking children forced to wear a dunce’s cap for speaking their own language. Similarly, when the apartheid government tried to force African children to learn in Afrikaans, the result was the Soweto riots. Interfering with established language rights is simply a political no-go area. But that is just what the ANC has done.
For the DA, the issue is overshadowed by the ill-fated experience of the Mmusi Maimane leadership period. The choice of Maimane as leader was, of course, another huge error of judgement by the DA leadership group. Maimane himself made it clear that he had happily supported the ANC under Mbeki and had only become alienated from the ANC under Zuma. But that meant he had happily gone along with Mbeki’s paranoid and often racist version of African nationalism, with his pro-Mugabe attitude and his Aids denialism. This should have disqualified him as a leader of the liberal tradition, or at least necessitated a far longer apprenticeship period before he was allowed to lead the party.
Inevitably, Maimane as DA leader exhibited these same instincts. Under Tony Leon the DA had established regular contacts with Solidarity/Afriforum, a practice which continued under Helen Zille’s leadership – but which came to an abrupt halt under Maimane. Moreover, whenever an incident occurred in which allegations of racism were made against whites, Maimane unhesitatingly assumed that the whites were guilty and publicly sided against them. In several cases – most notably that of a young Afrikaans school teacher in Schweizer-Reinecke – it turned out that there was no foundation for such allegations, and Maimane had rushed to judgement before ascertaining the facts. Inevitably, this was resented by Afrikaans-speakers.
Even what were relative storms in a teacup mattered. In 2018, following a Super Rugby match, two highly astute rugby commentators, Nick Mallet and Naas Botha, were accused of racism on live TV by the former Springbok player Ashwin Willemse. Both men were mystified by the accusation, but Maimane immediately sided with Willemse, a player of colour. In fact, both Botha and Mallet were wholly exonerated, and Willemse failed completely to substantiate his accusation. But, like most rugby programmes, this Supersport TV debate had a large Afrikaans-speaking audience – and they were unimpressed by Maimane’s knee-jerk siding against two of their rugby heroes.
Similarly, Afrikaans opinion was greatly agitated by the forces pressing for Afrikaans-medium instruction to be abandoned at Stellenbosch University. Normally one would have expected the DA to enter the lists to speak up for the language rights of any minority, including Afrikaners – but Maimane showed zero interest in the issue.
Ultimately, the DA lost half a million votes in the 2019 election, and it was clear that most of them were Afrikaans-speakers. The DA’s capture of a majority of Afrikaans voters had been one of Leon’s signal achievements during his leadership of the DA, and it was clear that Maimane had unnecessarily alienated this key group. This ultimately cost him the DA leadership. The DA had had a nasty shock, and even in 2024 it failed to recover all the ground lost by Maimane. It was a very sharp warning that the DA needed to show much greater sensitivity to Afrikaans issues and feelings.
This affects the situation with BELA. The DA realises that for many Afrikaans-speakers this is a vital issue. It is not just about their children’s education, but involves existential issues about the survival of the Afrikaans language and culture, and thus of Afrikaner identity itself. Should the ANC decide to ride roughshod over such feelings, one cannot rule out the possibility of large-scale civil disobedience and a degree of popular mobilisation which the government would find deeply unsettling.
The DA, for its part, knows that anything less than the very staunchest defence of Afrikaans language-rights could alienate a key part of its support base. And Afrikaans is third only to isiZulu and isiXhosa as a mother tongue, with large numbers of Coloured and African speakers of the language. All of which makes this a no-compromise issue for the DA. True, there will be those in the business community who would deplore losing the financial and economic benefits of the GNU over a “mere” issue about schooling, but they will have to make their case primarily to Ramaphosa.
The president is, after all, well aware that the DA’s entry to government has brought a relaxation of tensions, lower interest rates, lower bond rates on the national debt, even lower unemployment. And there is no doubt that it is popular with the electorate at large. Would Ramaphosa be willing to sacrifice all that – on the verge of his G20 presidency, nogal – merely to placate the likes of Lesufi? Ramaphosa, a natural ditherer, would no doubt like to delay any decision indefinitely. But it is precisely his failure to kick this whole matter into touch a long time ago which has put him in his current fix. D-day, when a decision has to be taken, is December 13.
FEATURED IMAGE: Participants in a protest march organised by the Solidarity Movement against the Bela Act gather at the Voortrekker Monument, 5 November 2024. According to Solidarity, it was the ‘largest protest march by Afrikaans-speaking people since 1994’. Image: Facebook.